Behind Trump and Vance Is This Man’s Movement

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2025

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Vice President JD Vance gave a speech recently that deserved more attention than it got. Accepting an award at a right-wing think tank, he argued that there’s a fundamental brokenness in how we define who is an American. He explained that this is the root of many of our country’s problems: a national identity that has become too broad. That was also a core idea of the 2018 book “The Virtue of Nationalism,” which caused a sensation on the right. Its author, the Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony, went on to build a movement. For years, he has hosted NatCon — short for National Conservatism — conferences. Those events have featured speakers like Marco Rubio, who is now the secretary of state, and Senator Josh Hawley. And one of the most reliable speakers, year after year, has been Vance. I wanted to talk to Hazony. What exactly is his argument, his worldview? And are the Trump administration’s policies putting it into practice? Mentioned: JD Vance’s speech at The Claremont Institute Book Recommendations: The Demon in Democracy by Ryszard Legutko The Strategy of Denial by Elbridge Colby Israel and Civilization by Josh Hammer Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Will Peischel. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The Vice President Jady Vance gave a speech recently that deserved more attention than it got.
0:37.4	Vance was accepting an award from the Claremont
0:39.1	Institute, a right-wing think tank, and not just any award, an award for statesmanship. And Vance in
0:45.7	this speech sets himself a few tasks. One is to understand the nature of the left. And I'm going to be
0:52.2	honest, I don't give him high marks for where he ended up.
0:55.1	The radicals of the far left, they don't need a unifying ideology of what they're for, because they
1:02.1	know very well what they're against. What unites Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites, and big pharma lobbyists.
1:14.6	It isn't the ideas of Thomas Jefferson or even of Karl Marx.
1:19.4	It's hatred.
1:21.4	They hate the people in this room.
1:24.6	They hate the president of the United States.
1:27.2	And most of all, they hate the people who voted for the President of the United States, and most of all, they hate the people
1:29.3	who voted for that President of the United States in the last election in November. This is the
1:35.6	animating principle of the American far left. Something I've always found interesting about Vance,
1:41.6	is that if you read Hillbilly Elgy, and I've read it a couple of times,
1:45.9	if you take seriously what he is struggling with in that book, one of the things he's struggling
1:50.6	with is a sense of being othered. Vance reads his own audio book. You can hear him saying this.
1:56.6	I realized that in this new world, I was the cultural alien. I began to think seriously about questions that had nagned at me since I was a teenager.
2:05.1	Why has no one else from my high school made it to the Ivy League?
2:08.8	Why are people like me so poorly represented in America's elite institutions?
2:13.9	Why is domestic strife so common in families like mine?
	...

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